The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

December 9th 2008 – SIGGRAPH Asia, Singapore – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has ratified and publicly released the OpenVG™ 1.1 specification, a new version of the royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics acceleration. OpenVG 1.1 adds a Glyph API for hardware accelerated text rendering, full acceleration support for Adobe® Flash® and Flash Lite 3 technologies and multi-sampled anti-aliasing. The new OpenVG specification is accompanied by an open source sample implementation and a full suite of conformance tests implemented by the Khronos Group. OpenVG has been developed by Khronos members including Adobe, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Huone, Imagination Technologies, Monotype Imaging, NDS, Nokia, NVIDIA, Symbian, TAKUMI and Texas Instruments. The OpenVG API specification and more details about the sample implementation and conformance tests are available at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/.

OpenVG defines low-level 2D operations based on Bezier curves to provide hardware acceleration for vector graphics and engines such as such as Adobe Flash and SVG™. OpenVG enables high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics and text with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption – ideal for embedded and handheld battery-powered devices. The OpenVG Adopters Program maintained by Khronos enables OpenVG implementers to license the OpenVG conformance tests and to license the OpenVG trademark for use with conformant implementations.

Quotes from OpenVG Working Group Members

“As a member of the Khronos Group, Adobe continues to support and believe in open standards to bring better and more consistent computing experiences to consumers worldwide,” said Mahesh Balakrishnan, director of product management and strategy at Adobe. “Adobe is excited about the added support of OpenVG 1.1 in Flash Lite 3, which offers our partners and customers new opportunities to develop rich and powerful Flash-based mobile applications, content and user interfaces.”

“Imagination Technologies has already delivered OpenVG 1.0.1 conformance on our POWERVR MBX and SGX IP cores,” said Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies. “We are delighted with today's announcement of OpenVG 1.1. Used alongside OpenGL ES for 3D graphics, OpenVG enables advanced vector graphics for user interfaces and other applications which redefine how 2D is perceived. Imagination is committed to continue to deliver the most efficient, highest performance OpenVG solutions for all our current and future POWERVR graphics cores.”

“NDS is proud to have contributed to the OpenVG 1.1 specification,” said Nick Thexton, NDS senior vice president, R&D, New Initiatives. “This development sets a firm foundation for new kinds of user interaction and an enhanced viewer experience on multiple displays, including meeting the requirements of the growing global HDTV market,” he continued. “This is a big step forward for consumers, and is truly set to change the way people are entertained and informed.”

“As a Khronos member collaborating on this project, our focus was to enable support for a hardware-accelerated text rendering solution,” said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging Inc. “We believe OpenVG 1.1 will help to facilitate the adoption of rich multimedia services on mobile devices in various markets with diverse and complex language requirements. As a result of improved rendering performance and reduced power consumption on handheld devices, we envision that media players, browser applications, user interfaces and other services that rely on textual components will benefit through enhanced user experiences. Monotype Imaging has recently introduced a new version of its scalable font and text rendering solution that supports the OpenVG 1.1 API.”

“We have recognized the increasing sophistication of GUI and other rich content on embedded systems that drives the need for open standards that enable a total graphics solution from IP cores to content creation,” said Koji Iguchi associate senior vice president at NEC System Technologies. “NEC Systems Technologies welcomes the launch of the Khronos Group's OpenVG 1.1 specification and we expect OpenVG will play a key role as the industry standard for vector graphics acceleration and become widely adopted throughout the industry and we will continue to support OpenVG for our GA88 IP cores.”

“TAKUMI welcomes this break-through release of OpenVG 1.1 API that enables embedded and mobile devices to be used in richer and more intuitive operability,” said Hiroyuki Nitta, CTO of TAKUMI. “TAKUMI has contributed so far to rich graphical user interface and games by delivering 'GSHARK-TAKUMI Technology', OpenGL ES 1.1-compliant 3D Hardware graphics accelerator IP cores, to mobile phones and embedded systems. We are committed to enabling new vector graphics applications for various handheld and embedded devices with our current lineup of Vector Graphics Hardware Accelerators and its low power and small footprint architecture.”

OpenVG Briefing at SIGGRAPH ASIA
Representatives from Khronos and the OpenVG Working Group will be presenting an overview of the OpenVG 1.1 specification at the Khronos Developer University at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore on 10th December 2008. More details of this free event are available at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_asia_2008.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.